Frederic Leighton: His Palette E-Book

Arron Adams

• Herausgeber: Arron Adams
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

Lord Frederic Leighton (1830-1896), was one of the most famous British artists of the nineteenth century. The recipient of many national and international awards and honours, he was well acquainted with members of the royal family and with most of the great artists, writers and politicians of the late Victorian era.Leighton preferred to paint subject matter that was connected to ancient Greek and Roman mythology. He intended for his paintings to be visually beautiful and his work then and now has a reputation for luminous colours and solidly drawn figures. Leighton's contemporaries included the French Impressionist painters and he would have seen the work of Monet, Renoir and others in both Paris and London.

Leseprobe

Frederic Leighton

His Palette

By Arron Adams

First Edition

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Frederic Leighton: His Palette

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Copyright © 2016Arron Adams

Foreword

Lord Frederic Leighton (1830-1896), was one of the most famous British artists of the nineteenth century. The recipient of many national and international awards and honours, he was well acquainted with members of the royal family and with most of the great artists, writers and politicians of the late Victorian era.

Leighton preferred to paint subject matter that was connected to ancient Greek and Roman mythology. He intended for his paintings to be visually beautiful and his work then and now has a reputation for luminous colours and solidly drawn figures. Leighton's contemporaries included the French Impressionist painters and he would have seen the work of Monet, Renoir and others in both Paris and London.

Leighton said of the Impressionists that 'Impressionism is a reaction from the old conventionalism, but an impressionist must not forget that it is the deep-sinking and not the fugitive impressions which are the best'. Leighton's role at the RoyalAcademy included the education of younger artists. His great ability for this is summed up in the words of one of his pupils; the sculptor Hamo Thornycroft wrote, 'he was the most energetic and took the greatest pains to help the students. He was, moreover, an inspiring master'.

Leighton was born in Scarborough to a family in the import and export business. He was educated at UniversityCollegeSchool, London. He then received his artistic training on the European continent, first from Eduard von Steinle and then from Giovanni Costa. When he was 24 he was in Florence; he studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, and painted the procession of the Cimabue Madonna through the Borgo Allegri. From 1855 to 1859 he lived in Paris, where he met Ingres, Delacroix, Corot and Millet.

In 1860, he moved to London, where he associated with the Pre-Raphaelites. He designed Elizabeth Barrett Browning's tomb for Robert Browning in the EnglishCemetery, Florence in 1861. In 1864 he became an associate of the RoyalAcademy and in 1878 he became its President (1878–96). His 1877 sculpture, Athlete Wrestling with a Python, was considered at its time to inaugurate a renaissance in contemporary British sculpture, referred to as the New Sculpture. His paintings represented Britain at the great 1900 Paris Exhibition.

Leighton remained a bachelor and rumours of his having an illegitimate child with one of his models in addition to the supposition that Leighton may have been homosexual continue to be debated today. He certainly enjoyed an intense and romantically tinged relationship with the poet Henry William Greville whom he met in Florence in 1856. The older man showered Leighton in letters, but the romantic affection seems not to have been reciprocated. Enquiry is furthermore hindered by the fact that Leighton left no diaries and his letters are telling in their lack of reference to his personal circumstances. No definite primary evidence has yet come to light that effectively dispels the secrecy that Leighton built up around himself. Although it's clear that he did court a circle of younger men around his artistic studio.

Leighton was knighted at Windsor in 1878, and was created a baronet in the County of Middlesex eight years later.

Leighton died 25 January 1896 of angina pectoris.After his death his house in HollandPark, London has been turned into a museum, the LeightonHouseMuseum. It contains a number of his drawings and paintings, as well as some of his former art collection including works by Old Masters and his contemporaries such as a painting dedicated to Leighton by Sir John Everett Millais.

Paintings

Cimabue's Madonna Carried in Procession, 1853 – 1855, oil on canvas

A brightly coloured procession of figures escorts The Rucellai Madonna altarpiece (Uffizi, Florence) through the streets of Florence. The scene is based upon a story from the 'Lives of the Artists' by Giorgio Vasari who wrote, 'this work was an object of so much admiration to the people of that day - they having then never seen anything better - that it was carried in solemn procession, with the sound of trumpets and other festal demonstrations, from the house of Cimabue to the church'. The altarpiece was commissioned in 1285 by a Dominican fraternity, the Company of Laudesi, and although Vasari attributed the panel to Cimabue, it is now known to be by Duccio di Buoninsegna, who is named in the contract. Cimabue, wearing white and crowned with a laurel wreath, leads his pupil Giotto by the hand. On the far right Dante, leaning against a wall with his back to the viewer, watches the procession. King Charles of Anjou is probably the mounted figure bringing up the rear. Various other artist contemporaries of Cimabue make up the rest of the crowd carrying the trestle upon which the altarpiece sits. In depicting a biographical incident from the life of a Renaissance artist, Leighton was following a fashion which began in the early nineteenth century in France with artists such as Ingres, who in 1814 painted Raphael in his studio with his muse, 'La Fornarina' (FoggArt Museum, Harvard). Such paintings often emphasised the innate genius of the artist along with the nurturing of this talent by a gifted master (as in this case between Cimabue and Giotto), and were undoubtedly influenced by the publication of such works as Vasari's 'Lives' which was translated into French in 1805 and English in 1850 by Mrs Jonathan Foster.

Although born in Yorkshire, Frederic Leighton began his formal art education in Frankfurt at the Städelsches Kunstinstitut, where he first trained under J.D. Passavant then under Eduard von Steinle. It was Steinle who instilled in his protégé an interest in Medievalism and early Italian art - the tutor's list of paintings that Leighton should see during a visit to Florence included works by Cimabue, Giotto, Masaccio, Uccello, Gozzoli, Ghirlandaio and Botticelli. It was also Steinle who suggested Leighton first visit Rome, and who provided an introduction to Peter Cornelius (1783 - 1867), one of the last remaining Nazarenes still living in the city. The influence of the Nazarene tradition, with its careful depiction of nature, its interest in fresco and its reverence for the purity of early art is evident in Cimabue's Madonna, although the religious function of art, which is typically a key message of Nazarene works, is of less importance in this painting than is the subject of art history itself - and in particular the notion of artistic 'progress' over time. The painting was displayed at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1855, where it was purchased by Queen Victoria at a private viewing before the opening day for six hundred guineas. Leighton made a large number of preparatory drawings for the painting, and also consulted pattern books in an attempt to achieve accuracy for the historical costume. Compositionally, it is carefully constructed in a geometric manner evocative of Renaissance principles of harmony, the wall being two-thirds the height of the picture and the adult figures being two-thirds the height of the wall. Cimabue and Giotto also cross hands at the precise horizontal centre point.

Detail

Detail

Detail